Google makeover for Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

Six degrees of Kevin Bacon, the student party game that caught the world's attention in the mid-90s and became a pop culture phenomenon, has been revived by the search giant.

It's new search tool lets you calculate the "Bacon Number" of any actor, meaning you no longer need to rely on movie fans to work out how many degrees a star is removed from a Kevin Bacon film.

To use the new tool, simply type "Bacon number" into the Google search field followed by the name of the actor.

For example, "Bacon number Nicole Kidman" reveals the Aussie actress is linked to Bacon by Oscar-winner Dianne Wiest. Kidman and Wiest appeared in Rabbit Hole while Wiest and Bacon starred in Footloose. Kidman's Bacon Number is therefore two - two degrees of separation.

The search engine also works on names outside Hollywood, with Barack Obama and the Queen each scoring a Bacon Number of two. However, it doesn't work for Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott or Mitt Romney.

Yossi Matias, who headed the project, said it was a way to show the power of Google's search engine.

"If you think about search in the traditional sense, for years it has been to try and match, find pages and sources where you would find the text," he told the Hollywood Reporter.

"It's interesting that this small-world phenomenon when applied to the world of actors actually shows that in most cases, most actors aren't that far apart from each other. And most of them have a relatively small Bacon number."

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon was created in 1994 by three students at Albright College in Pennsylvania after they started to notice that Bacon in a lot of the films they were watching.

They later told interviewers: "It became one of our stupid party tricks, I guess. People would throw names at us, and we'd connect them to Kevin Bacon."

Bacon, who has 74 credits to his name, initially disliked the game, believing it was ridiculing, but he eventually warmed to it and even set up his own charity website, sixdegrees.org, based on it.

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